For a little background on the game, it's essentially a flying game dragon style. You fly around as Saphira the dragon snapping up Urgals or breathing fire in an attempt to meet the objectives set before you. Your buddy Eragon rides on your back and fires different kinds of arrows or uses magic spells to aid you.

It really is sad to see the Herculean efforts the game developer had to go through to provide at least some control over the game action. The fact that these are often not easily employed, nor are they intuitive, could be laid at their feet as a failure but I'm wracking my brain trying to determine how you'd do it without a very key element: a right analog stick.

The first issue is with flight. Obviously the left analog stick has to control where you are moving. This is a gaming convention from which none shall deviate and survive. So the left analog stick controls your direction of flight. Since there is no right analog stick, the default camera has you above Saphira looking in the direction you are flying. This seems workable until you remove Saphira's ability to stop on a dime and add more realistic flight dynamics (similar to a fixed wing aircraft). But it's still not a problem until you actually try to aim at something. You just can't do it. You can fly directly at them, but you eliminate any ability to fly evasively.

In order to overcome this, the game developers added three features that solve the immediate problem, but can come off as hard to use. The first is the ability to strafe. By holding down a particular button, you basically redefine what the other buttons do. Instead of buttons for accelerate and decelerate, you have buttons for ascend and descend. Instead of looking where you fly, you look straight ahead and fly sideways, up or down. In this mode you can move relative you where you are looking, but you still can't easily change what you are looking at.

The second trick they employed was a target lock on feature. If you can aim at something successfully, you have the option to lock the camera on to that target. This option is just as useless because it still requires you to aim while you are swooping around and stay aimed because if the prey flies too quickly out of your view, the lock breaks and you end up looking in some other direction anyway.

The third camera trick, I actually found quite innovative given the limitation I've been harping on the whole time. When you use the Brisingr fire spell, instead of having to aim at the target, which would be virtually impossible, the game switches to the perspective of the fireball that flies at a decent clip toward the target. You then use the analog stick to change its direction and guide it to the target. On its path, you can hit a button to detonate it early making it actually somewhat usable.

The game could have been unplayable, and it was a little too challenging before you get to the stages where you find Eragon and have him atop your back wielding his bow. But yet again, the developers strove to compensate for the lack of independent camera control. With the bow, the game basically auto aims you at the guy on screen that's nearest to the center. You see a nametag pop up identifying him along with a medium sized circle that acts as an aim point. All you have to do is hold the trigger button down and two symbols similar to half circles move towards the target and converge on the target. The closer the two halves are without the circle turning red, the better the accuracy.

The system definitely works, but it degenerates the problem down to a simple timing rather than a more realistic accuracy based aiming. But hey, what do you expect from a system with only one analog stick?

Control issues aside, the game does look pretty decent on the PSP. There are plenty of particle effects and much of the geometry on a given stage is destructible. As a matter of fact, on some stages you may lose because the player did too much damage to the buildings in the city.

As far as the story goes, don't expect much here. It appears like the game was trying to incorporate elements from the book and movie in whatever order were convenient. As a result, the story is discombobulated at best. At the worst, it appears like a series of unrelated stages that make sense to the game, but no sense for the movies at all. I've just recently read the books, but have yet to see the movie. Either this game deviates significantly from the movie or the movie takes liberal license with the content in the book. Either way, there's no reason to play the game for the story.

It's really too bad, that the only positive comment I can make about the game without qualifying it, is the fact that the developers built in the game sharing option that allows you to play the game with your friends without requiring them all to own a copy of the game. Unfortunately PSPs are in relative short supply in my location so I was unable to try out the multiplayer game.

I can't decide who's at fault here. Is it Sony for including 3D power and no way to control the camera? Or is it the fault of these game developers that insist on developing 3D games that obviously need camera control? Racing games seem to work fine. Fixed camera games seem to have no trouble. Was it Sony's intention for there to be no first person shooter type games on the handheld? No good 3D platform games? Could they really have been that short sighted?

If anyone has any answers to these questions that plague my conscious existence, please share them. I'm dying to learn if I'm ever going to be able to use this shiny black paperweight of mine.